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The Journal News

PEARL RIVER - Number crunching in the corporate world generally translates into larger bottom-line profits. Number crunching in the educational world generally translates into higher test scores and lower taxes, especially in Pearl River, where officials credit success to analyzing data.

The 2,710-student district, one of Rockland's smallest, has been identified by The Journal News as one of eight Lower Hudson Valley school districts with higher-than-average student test scores and lower-than-average school taxes. In the 2005-06 school year, 88.6 percent of Pearl River students scored at or above standards on the state's English, math, science and social studies tests. The average residential tax bill was $5,033.

After state and federal governments began holding districts accountable for student test outcomes in 2000, educators nationwide began taking crash courses in working with databases.

Pearl River first used data analysis about 1990 as a way to improve what had been lackluster scores. After more than 15 years of information sifting, the district has learned to do it very well indeed, administrators said.

"The thing is, we're not just looking at the data for the numbers, we're looking at what's behind the data in terms of student learning," said Sue Wheeler, Pearl River's curriculum director. "It's one thing to say you have 90-whatever percent of the kids meeting state standards, but what does that mean for real kids?"

Pearl River is a relatively affluent district. Most of the children started in kindergarten and remained in Pearl River schools through high school graduation. Because of its size, it gets by with four central office administrators, an advantage because there's more oversight by decision makers and more connection between administrators and children, Superintendent Frank Auriemma said.

Administrators are mindful of their advantages over more diverse and larger districts with less-supportive communities behind them.

"You can't minimize the demographics," Auriemma said. "It would be insulting to the people who do good work in those districts to say if we were to take over, they would look like Pearl River in a year or two. They wouldn't. But I would say, with humility, that how we manage data would be helpful to a lot of districts."

Pearl River early on developed its own database system using a simple Excel spreadsheet, ignoring many of what Auriemma called the "flavor of the month" commercial programs now on the market.

"We concentrate on what needs to be done, not what needs to be bought," said John Morgano, the district's assistant superintendent.

The district's collection of data fills a 5-inch-high binder, Morgano said. Wheeler has whittled student information to a single sheet of paper, similar to an attendance sheet, that is given to each teacher at the start of the school year and is color-coded to show each child's strengths and weaknesses.

"It's one thing to give teachers a binder of data and wish them good luck with it," Auriemma said. "It's another thing to do the analysis of that binder so as a teacher I get a sheet - one sheet - with all the accumulated data highlighted by color. There's a real strength to that."

Teachers who want more in-depth information on a child have access to the larger binder. Regular meetings between Wheeler and each teacher take place whenever new test scores are available and as curriculum changes. Similar meetings take place between high-level administrators and the school board so policy matches practice.

The district also sets specific goals for its administrators for improvement and names names, Auriemma said.

"We have goals ... and a list of people responsible for getting it done and an asterisk by the name of the person who reports out," Morgano said. "That goal setting focuses limited resources. At the end of the year, that gets reviewed. The targeted goals are based on the data, and progress on that is reported quarterly. What gets measured gets done."